I do not know whether you’ve noticed but it seems that the more our telephone companies expand their services, the poorer the service they give. I don’t know if the Malta Communications Authority has noticed this, but I am sure the consumers have. Competition is supposed to bring about better quality and a better service. But what is the rule in other countries is the exception in Malta. Over here, competition and liberalisation of telephony has not improved the service, but on the contrary it got worse.
Let us take the case of telephone reception from mobile phones. One phone company has a reputation for poor reception, so that the further away you are from any main door, the worse the line gets. Every time subscribers to this company get a call, they have to go outside to hear what the caller has to say. I was speaking to an embassy official in Malta who also complained about the same phone company, and when I told him that you could request the installation of boosters in your office, he rightly replied that the booster only partially solves the problem. Still the problem remains: he cannot ask to be excused from a meeting every time he gets a call, so that he can go near a window or an outside door to answer it. In effect, he told me that the embassy was going to revoke the contract with this mobile company.
The other company has good reception for telephony, but then its internet service is very poor. This company provides a combined internet and telephone service, and clients using this package complain that every other week either one or the other is out of service. And to add insult to injury, no deduction is made from the monthly service charge for the days that clients are out of service.
We also notice that the more these phone companies expand their services, the poorer their customer care becomes. If you phone them for a complaint most of them leave you waiting for more than a quarter of an hour, listening to music as if this is going to calm down your frustration, and they then transfer you from one operator to the other.
Not only that, but if you have a complaint about your phone bill, one specific company (Melita) refuses to give you an appointment with an officer from the billing section, as it tells you that it does not see clients and it only handles complaints by email or telephone. But you know as well as I do that there are cases when you have to definitely to meet the staff to discuss a billing complaint. It is true that these companies have their outlets, but these outlets do not provide billing solutions.
I cannot understand how these phone companies are allowed to increase their services and at the same time downsize their workforce. This is something that does not make sense and it is the responsibility of the Malta Communications Authority to ensure that the workforce complements the services provided by that phone company.
We know that many of these companies send a number of workers on the dole in what they call a ‘restructuring’ process, but this does not have to be at the expense of the consumer. These phone companies are not geared to cater for the customers who are employed but for housewives and for the unemployed. I cannot understand how they expect you to stay at home for five hours, as they are unable to give you an appointment, when they can come to your house to fix or install a service. No matter how much you plead with them that you have no time to stay idle at home for five hours they do not budge and you are left with no option but to either lose half a day’s work, or pay somebody to stay at home and wait for them to come.
Where I live we have a wire hanging down from a balcony, which will soon reach street-level and get in the way of passers-by. We have discovered that it belongs to the Go company. The administrator of our block has been complaining about it to Go since last summer, but to date Go has not lifted a finger to have this potential danger removed.
Strange but true, the way the matter is handled by Go gives you the feeling that you are dealing with the Civil Service, and not with a private company such as Tecom which has invested so much in this company.
But the MCA seems to be indifferent to all this, as we are seeing no improvement at all in the customer care service of these phone companies. The development in technology is not measured by the number of customers but by the number of complaints, because it is useless to add a new service if that new service is not adequate. Why does the MCA bless the new service of a phone company without enquiring about the efficiency of that service and the support staff needed to implement it? In this day and age of liberalisation, what makes news to us is not the granting of a new license or the granting of a new service, but an efficient and reliable service.
I do not know the reason for the poor reception of one phone company and the constant internet interruption in the other, but there must be a technical solution to all this. I cannot understand how the issue of poor reception is being tackled by a booster, which costs €2,300 for non-regular clients, when this booster is limited to calls made or received in a limited area, so that when you are outside that area the problem persists. Nor can I say why the other company has this recurring fault in its internet provision. It is high time that the Malta Communications Authority looks into the matter and it must make it its policy not to allow any further expansion of services to the mobile phone companies once they are not in a position to handle their existing services.
The saga of the phone directory is another responsibility of the MCA. I dare say that we are the only country in the EU that does not have an up-to-date phone directory. So we are being charged every time we ask for a phone number, and if given the wrong number we are charged twice, because you have to call again for the correct number. Not only that, but sometimes you ask for a particular number which you are sure exists in the old directory, and the operator insists that it does not exist.
We are still being kept in the dark as to whose responsibility it is to publish this blessed phone book. We have been deprived of this book for five years because its latest edition dates back to 2004. With the monies that we have paid to the phone enquiries I am sure that we have subsidized the costs of this phone book.
It is also the duty of the MCA to inform us whether the government is acting in accordance with EU regulations when imposing an excise tax on mobile phone bills. As far as I know excise tax in EU is only allowed on alcohol and cigarettes and there is no EU state that imposes an excise tax on mobile phone calls.
Another query which the MCA has to settle concerns the worries of the mobile phone users who are being told that the mobile phone companies tape all the conversations on mobile phones. The consumers are worried about this and we expect a clear declaration from the MCA as to whether this is true or not, and whether this is legal.
It is high time that the Authority finds a balance between the providers and the consumers, because up to now it tends to favour the former more than the latter.
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I don’t know if the Malta Communications Authority has noticed this, but I am sure the consumers have. Competition is supposed to bring about better quality and a better service. But what is the rule in other countries is the exception in Malta. Over here, competition and liberalisation of telephony has not improved the service, but on the contrary it got worse.
